Many forms of legal document such as joint venture agreements, construction contracts, licences or materials supply agreements are created by companies in the conduct of their business. For example, The Pooling and Settlement Agreement for England and Wales which governs the trading of electricity has over 7000 clauses, 5900 cross-references, and 2000 definitions.
Frequently the documents may be interrelated, such as those which deal with different aspects of a new power station project, for example: joint venture, power purchase, fuels supply, construction, and operation and maintenance agreements for which consistency in the usage of defined terms, dates, liabilities and so forth across the agreements is important.
It is a huge task to prepare and check all the documentation, often involving many people. Usually, there is time pressure in the preparation of the documents especially during negotiations. The documents may need to be redrafted many times to accommodate the changes, any of which may lead to errors.
Only now are systems coming to market which are starting to help contract draughtsman. Although word processors have been in use for quite a few years, the level of machine checking has been limited to the use of a "spell checker", and "document comparison" to mark changes between different versions.
With the advent of the Internet and the worldwide web, the availability and popularity of a formatting language called HTML has increased dramatically. Many current commercially available programs, such as Word Processing and Internet Browser Software sold by Microsoft.RTM., can generate and read HTML.
HTML is an acronym of Hypertext Mark-up Language and is a particular form of a general mark-up language. The HTML language employs a series of standardized codes inserted into unformatted (typically ASCII) text. These codes, being standardized, can be read and understood by a wide variety of programs, operating on many different platforms. The text may thus be displayed in a formatted manner according to the codes embedded within the text.
One particular feature of HTML is the ability to create and view multi-dimensional electronic documents, which may be entered at many points and which may be browsed in any order by interactively choosing words or by phrases as search parameters for the next text or image to be viewed.
The words or key phrases which permit the user to jump quickly and easily to related text in other documents (or indeed within the document itself) are known as "hypertext links "or "hyperlinks". As with the formatting of the text itself, these hyperlinks are inserted using HTML mark-up tags.
Legal documents are naturally very rich in cross-references which can be made into hypertext links.
As will be familiar to those skilled in the art, hyperlinks are created in HTML by "tagging" chosen words or phrases with code. This code, which is of course hidden (i.e., not shown in the displayed text), defines the address of, for example, a document held on another server elsewhere, or that of a document held in the same directory as the current document, or even another position within the same document. In the latter case, the code associated with the displayed text forming the hypertext link is given a name by the user. When the hypertext link is activated (usually by clicking a mouse button), the programme reading and displaying the HTML code searches for a marker elsewhere within the document, the marker being the name given by the user to the hypertext link.
All current commercial authoring tools for creating documents with hyperlinks require the author to insert the links by hand. For contracts with many hundreds of possible links it is impractical to undertake this task manually.
Prior work on the automatic creation of hypertext links in hypermedia has been concerned with creating links between concepts contained in different documents. The problem has then been to analyse each document to find the key words or phrases which describe what the document is about, then to find similar documents for linking to.
As with, for example, speech recognition, sophisticated artificial intelligence is required to allow a program to understand ambiguous words or phrases in context and thereby correctly insert links. Currently, progress in this field is slow and is largely academic.
Anonymous Research Disclosure No. 350009, published Oct. 6, 1993, discloses a technique for creating automatic hyperlinks for reference documents. The hypertext generation program is written to read a referenced document and convert as many of its footnotes and bibliography references to multimedia link markers as possible. The program expects the footnote and bibliographical format used to be input along with the name of the document to be converted to multimedia hyperlinks. The program scans the document looking for footnote references or bibliographical references.
When a reference is found, a search is commenced with the reference passed on to a multimedia library system. If the library system finds the reference, it passes back the information to a hypertext generation program. The program then saves the information that allows the reference to be later hyperlinked. In addition, the conversion program saves information that allows the reference (footnote marker, bibliographical description) to be highlighted so as to indicate to a researcher (user, reader, etc.) that the reference is activated and available for immediate linking.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved technique for insertion of automatic hypertext links.